A Design Science Primer

BFI is committed to continued research into the practice and fundamental principles of comprehensive anticipatory design science and its relevance to contemporary global issues and design practice. Below we offer a wide range of writings, presentations, and surveys from an array of international scholars pertaining to Design Science.

During the last quarter century, Buckminster Fuller's concept of Design Science has come to mean different things to different people, evolving in the process into a potent combination of method, metaphor and myth.

The Five Core Principles of Sustainability have been developed to serve as a new framework to advance our understanding of what must guide our actions if we intend to implement breakthrough sustainability practices.

The central thesis of Places to Intervene in the System is "Leverage points are not intuitive. Or if they are, we intuitively use them backward, systematically worsening whatever problems we are trying to solve."

As the implementers of technology, designers have a mandate to do better. Technology doesn't just happen, it reaches society as the deliberate work of people acting as designers. Every product and procedure had been intentionally or inadvertently designed to be the way it is.

From the foreword: This primer outlines one alternative to present problem-solving techniques, an approach Buckminster Fuller calls "comprehensive anticipatory design science." Design science is "the effective application of the principles of science to the conscious design of our total environment in order to help make the Earth's finite resources meet the needs of all of humanity without disr

What are the resources? What are the tasks necessary to make 100% of humanity a success? How can we ever do so without ever advantaging one human at the expense of another? How may we render all the world and all its treasures enjoyable available to all men without having one interfering with or trespassing upon the other?

In Summer 1992, we sent a questionnaire to a number of close colleagues and associates of Buckminster Fuller: This questionnaire on Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science (CADS) asked the following questions: